The energy piggy bank — A serious game for energy conservation

Abstract

Serious games have attracted much attention recently and are used to in an engaging way support for example education and behavior change. In this paper, we present a serious game designed for helping people learn about their own energy consumption and to support behavior change towards more sustainable energy habits. We have designed the game for all the four Bartle Player Types, a taxonomy used to identify different motivations for playing games. Engagement of the participants has been evaluated using the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory, and we have measured self-assessed future behavior change. We found a statistically significant positive correlation between self-assessed future behavior change and perceived value/usefulness of the application independent of player type. Our study indicates the player type “Achievers” might perform better using this type of application and find it more enjoyable, but that it can be useful for learning energy conserving behavior independent of player type.